The Caribou Caper (1978)

D. Clive Donner
Colour


Peter Sellers, that gifted and subtle character actor of the 1950s, had truly morphed into a monster of a performer by the latter half of the 1970s. One who was quite happy to crash through all his scenes with as broad a characterisation as possible and carrying a side of ham on a platter the whole way. This was the period where he had just returned to prominence thanks to 'The Pink Panther' movies, never the most understated (or by this point reliably funny) of films and Sellers now seemed to regard any movie he was in as an extension of Inspector Clouseau. Everything he did had to be as loud and brash and hi-hi-hi-larious as possible, except when Sellers is on the screen generally only the first two apply.


And that’s a shame as this is a film that really cries out for a subtler Peter Sellers, perhaps not the everyman performer of the 1950s, but the 1960s model who could glide through the original 'Pink Panther' without deliberately pushing over every apple cart he could find.


Peter Sellers and Michael Caine are brothers, I know it’s difficult to believe when you look at them, but then elsewhere in cinema history Sean Connery played Dustin Hoffman’s dad and a woman named Katy Elder managed to birth two sons with a 36 year age difference. Sometimes you just have to go with these things. They’re not just any brothers mind you, but high-end criminal brothers who have carried out a series of daring jewel thefts across Europe. Now they want one more job, Caine so he can have security on the yacht he plans to sail around the world, and Sellers because it will help him fulfil his life-long dream of buying Napoleon’s underpants. And to do this they target wealthy American movie star, Caribou Curvaluv, (played with her usual levels of bored adequacy by Raquel Welch), but what happens when they each fall in love with her?


First things first, this is a film way out of time. In the sixties Sellers had the original ‘Pink Panther’, Caine had ‘Gambit’ and Welch had ‘Fathom’ – but nobody was making this kind of high-class caper romp in 1978. It’s perversely, ridiculously out of time and no amount of jokes about OPEC, President Carter and the British letting a woman lead a political party is going to solve that. What’s more these are three actors who could easily have made this film ten years earlier, and now seem a bit – well – gone to seed. Sellers, as was starting to be apparent in ‘The Ideas Man’, can’t help but look like a creepy uncle as he ogles young women in bikinis; Caine has that red-faced, sweaty, over-done potato look that he would later wheel out for the likes of ‘Blame it on Rio’, while Welch does shape up well, but one wouldn’t want to leave her in front of a radiator for too long. Let’s be fair, the set-up, the script, the leads would all have appeared better and more fitting in 1968.


It’s an odd film then and that’s before we get to the Peter Sellers factor.


You can really see the importance of collaboration in a film when it isn’t happening properly. Here is a case in point. Sellers and Caine don’t actually have that many scenes together. In the few they do, there is an easy camaraderie between there, a mutual respect. One wouldn’t really believe they were brothers, but they certainly come across as two people who have known each other a long time. When they’re apart though it’s perfectly clear they’re in completely different films. Caine is a likeable cockney, a classy villain, who is looking for one final job to assuage his mid-life crisis; Sellers is a barnpot who speaks constantly in a loud, manic voice and dreams of owning Napoleon’s underpants. It seems that on getting the script for a ‘classy crime comedy’, Caine paid attention to the word ‘classy’, while Sellers blew up the word ‘comedy’ into eighteen foot high letters.


Sellers tramples over everything in his path in his desire to get a laugh. Clearly not listening to Welch’s lines so he can comically leer at her and mug to straight to camera – in addition we have raising of eyebrows, desperate hand gestures and jumping over other actor’s lines, even when they’re seemingly crucial to the plot. It’s clearly the performance of a man out of control. And Caine’s subtler take on his part just makes it look worse.


As such this is a strange out of place, utterly disjointed, film – but one which, I suppose makes you feel like you’re getting two movies for the price of one.